I Did This in Under 30 Minutes

I’ve been spending the last few days building a new website called Artist Publisher. The idea is to help some of my artist friends begin writing about their lives and work, using artificial intelligence as a creative collaborator.

I have three friends in mind as I work on this. All three have spent their lives making art, and all three have stories worth telling. But I don't want to turn them into website developers. I want them to open ChatGPT, start talking, and discover what happens.

Today, while working on the website, I had a realization. The website itself should teach people how to use it.

We had been developing three categories: Journal, Memoir, and Literature. Each had a paragraph explaining what belonged there. Then I wondered: What if someone reading about Literature suddenly wanted to know how to write a book?

Why shouldn't they be able to click something right there and learn how?

That led to a larger idea. Every important part of the website could contain its own instructions. A short explanation for the curious, a more detailed tutorial for someone ready to begin. You wouldn't have to learn the whole system before using it. You could learn as you went.

I talked this through with Molly, my AI collaborator. She understood what I was getting at and wrote a founding vision for Artist Publisher. It was several pages long, and I listened to it three times while cleaning the kitchen and getting dinner ready.

It was remarkable to hear an idea we'd just been discussing become a coherent statement of purpose.

Then we wrote an introduction for the homepage, something I could narrate in my own voice. It explained that the creative work begins with a conversation in ChatGPT. The website comes later, when there's something to publish.

And that's when another idea occurred to me.

Why not demonstrate the whole process right now?

I looked at the clock. It was 6:12.

I proposed writing a journal entry called I Did This in Under 30 Minutes. We would write the story, create an illustration, prepare the narration, and assemble the files for publication on Mollyverse.

And I would keep making dinner.

Of course, the system behind this has taken months of experiments, mistakes, revisions, and occasional frustration. But that's precisely the point. Once the machinery is in place, the artist shouldn't have to think about it.

I'm 77 years old. I've been making art for more than half a century, and I'm still finding new ways to work. Increasingly, some of the most interesting things I make begin as conversations.

This journal entry is one of them.

Now let's see if we can finish before dinner gets cold.

Postscript

I missed my deadline by two minutes. But in those 32 minutes, I not only wrote a journal entry, created an illustration, prepared the narration, and got everything ready for publication—I also made dinner and ate it. Meatballs in flatbread, in case you’re wondering.

So technically, I failed the 30-minute challenge. But I did manage to publish a story while feeding myself.

I think I’ll call that a successful experiment. And the meatballs were excellent.